The Cult of “Sports Night”

“This is the second show he’s done about my life,” Keith Olbermann said to Dave Itzkoff of the Times, referring to Aaron Sorkin’s new HBO series, “The Newsroom,” which follows staff members on a fictional news program, principally, its powerful, mercurial host during what might be a public meltdown or a personal epiphany. The other show to which Olbermann alludes is “Sports Night,” Sorkin’s first on television—a quasi-sitcom that ran for two seasons on ABC, beginning in 1998. Similar to “The Newsroom,” “Sports Night” set its action within the production of a television show, a nightly sports-highlights broadcast. It was modelled on ESPN’s “SportsCenter,” which had made Olbermann a star, but which he quit in 1997, in one of the many bitter departures that would come to mark his career. “Sports Night” also introduced America to Sorkin’s distinct verbal rhythms, and retains a following.

As Tad Friend noted in his reporting on the show’s fraught genesis, “Sports Night” was at once novel and deeply rooted in conventional television forms. A quick synopsis makes it sound as if it were just another “Murphy Brown.” The show follows the schedule of a scrappy sports show as it struggles to improve ratings while maintaining the remnants of its journalistic soul. We sit in on daily story meetings, watch the smart-aleck anchors, Dan and Casey, played by Josh Charles and Peter Krause, report stories and write copy, and then later watch the live filming of the show, overseen by the show’s producer, Dana, played by Felicity Huffman, whose dogged professionalism and manic neuroses owe a clear debt to Holly Hunter’s character in James L. Brooks’s “Broadcast News.” Co-workers nurse crushes for each other, fall in and out of love, and generally exist within the second-family dynamic that propels nearly every workplace sitcom. And the show features the familiar hooting and chortling of a laugh track, perhaps the most contested element of its production—Sorkin didn’t want it, ABC did—which Friend examined in great detail. (Sorkin was right about the laugh track: the show didn’t have the broad moments of farce or one-liners that make live audiences laugh. And history has vindicated him—as the best comedies now on television let us laugh for ourselves.)

Yet the show, despite its familiar conceit, stood out among its workplace-sitcom competitors, and lived on, earning a devoted group of followers in syndication on Comedy Central. (It is now available for streaming on Netflix.) It was full of strong performances, from the three leads to the supporting players, like Joshua Malina, as a young producer named Jeremy, and Robert Guillaume, as Isaac, the executive in charge of the show. And “Sports Night” seemed interested, at least superficially, in exploring high-minded themes—alcoholism, the ethics of hunting, the fairness of American drug laws—without the usual saccharine sitcom resolutions.

Its most obvious defining feature, though, was the way its characters talked—and, looking back, its most lasting legacy may be that it introduced a relatively wide audience to what we might now safely call the Sorkin Sound: lightning-quick, repetitive, emotionally supercharged, culturally allusive banter that tornadoes into a spiral of stagey one-upmanship. Watch this scene (one of hundreds of possible examples) in which two characters contemplate their romantic futures:

In addition, “Sports Night” introduced what would become Sorkin’s two other trademark patterns of dialogue: the Sorkin Speech and the Sorkin Soliloquy. In the former, a smart, witty character deploys cutting rhetoric and esoteric facts to demonstrate his total mastery of lesser foils, as a character played by William H. Macy does here, to a bunch of studio hacks:

The Soliloquy, meanwhile, is also a lecture, but rather than to savage an enemy, it is deployed to impart a high-handed moral truth:

At the time, this kind of affected speech hadn’t yet hardened into formula, what Emily Nussbaum, in her review this week of “The Newsroom,” identifies as “all those Wagnerian rants, fingers poked in chests, palms slammed on desks, and so on.” Instead, it seemed invigorating, perhaps because it foregrounded the theatrical possibilities of television. Now it seems more of a parody of Sorkin than the real thing. (It should be noted, though, that Sorkin’s shows are especially susceptible to the Netflix Disease: an affliction affecting episodes of serial television that were intended to be watched a week apart, and which now suffer greatly when consumed in an end-to-end in a binge. Television needs to breathe.)

While the rhythms of Sorkin’s dialogue were unique among scripted television comedies at the time, they would have been familiar to one segment of the audience, devoted viewers who witnessed the short glory days of “SportsCenter,” as hosted by Olbermann, with his screen partner, Dan Patrick.

By the late nineties, cable had made sports coverage a comprehensive, twenty-four-hour-a-day enterprise. And nobody covered sports better than ESPN, which enjoyed a run of nearly unchallenged supremacy, before the Internet succeeded in diverting audience attention in so many directions. At the center of the ESPN empire was “SportsCenter,” a highlights show that, briefly, at least, became a truly interesting cultural artifact. Among its viewers, especially young men, “SportsCenter” shaped the way that people talked, not just about sports, but about everything, contributing to the rise of a generation of fast-talking, sarcastic boys whose speech patterns became enthralled, perhaps above all else, by the catchphrase. (Kids went around muttering such phrases as “En fuego” and “A good craftsman doesn’t blame his tools,” like some pop-culture saturated characters in a Don DeLillo novel.) Olbermann later described the chemistry on “SportsCenter” to James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales, in their ESPN oral history, “Those Guys Have All the Fun,” as something akin to “improvisational jazz”—a bit much, but there was something spontaneous and captivating about watching them together onscreen, as in this clip, from 1996:

It was natural to assume that Olbermann and Patrick simply continued their inspired banter after the cameras stopped rolling, an idea that animates all of “Sports Night.”

Neither of the anchors from the show much resemble Olbermann in either appearance or mannerism—both instead channel similar versions of Dan Patrick (that they never quite match the inspired banter on the real “SportsCenter” is one of the limitations of the show)—but like Olbermann, they both seem a bit too intelligent to be reading the sports scores. They appear to be keenly aware of this fact, and so they wink at the audience. Still, their macho-sarcasm preening masks a rigorous earnestness, and, most importantly, a distaste for cynicism. Rather than mock sports as a silly diversion, “Sports Night” celebrates its characters’ faith in the games and deep knowledge of their arcana—making their work seem both honorable and enviable. That made “Sports Night” stand out as well; the work that the characters did—producing the show—wasn’t just some excuse to get them into a confined space together. Instead, it was the show’s true subject. Making an also-ran sports-news show may not have been the same as making high art, but it was a craft, and needed to be taken seriously. In the series’ main plot arcs—all of which involved some kind of network meddling—the heroes, or “creatives,” understood this, while the villains, or “suits,” did not.

Sorkin battled with the network over “Sports Night” throughout its run—about focus groups, ad campaigns, and likability scores. Olbermann had many of the same battles at ESPN. In each case, the talent was convinced that the management had it in for them. (Unsurprisingly, the two men are friends.) In this way, Olbermann was the animating spirit of “Sports Night.” He is the ur-Sorkin character: the smartest guy in the room—loved and loathed for his charming verbosity, unparalleled abilities, and often corrosive self-regard.

There are shades of Olbermann in all of Sorkin’s heroes: President Bartlet on “The West Wing,” Brad Pitt’s Billy Beane in “Moneyball,” and, most strikingly, the fictionalized Mark Zuckerberg in “The Social Network.” Each of these characters are cast as visionaries against a horde of uncreative people who attempt to obstruct them. They are each artists—and Sorkin proxies. That helps explain the rather odd tone of outrage that pervaded the two seasons of “Sports Night.” Just what were all these characters so upset about again? Unfortunately, outrage is a difficult commodity to convert into satisfying half-hour television, especially when the subject is as mundane as that night’s baseball scores. (Sorkin’s poetic anger found much more satisfying expression in “The West Wing,” a fictionalized world in which undeniably real things were at stake.)

“Sports Night” isn’t the only show that has offered a meta-commentary on the medium. Nor is it the only one to wage a proxy war with the executives at its own network. This would happen later on “Arrested Development,” for instance, when its creators mocked the show’s imminent cancellation, and it has become a feature of other imperiled critical hits, such as “30 Rock,” on NBC. Yet, from its first episode to its last, “Sports Night” spent most of its time arguing about just how artistically and intellectually ambitious a television show can be (this was just before the HBO revolution), which reflected the very fight Sorkin was waging in real life with ABC. Looking at “Sports Night” now—a flawed show that seems to want to be more serious and unique than it really is—you see it as the product of an argument that Sorkin lost.

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